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Top 6 underused Eclipse shortcuts for CFEclipse

2008 July 02
by Mike Henke

Similar to Nic Tunney's Top 6 Underused ColdFusion Functions I figured I would post an Eclipse underused shortcuts for CFEclipse users. I think it was during a CFObjective presentation by Dan Wilson, I witnessed the copy down shortcut (ctrl-alt-down) and was impressed.

I feel many CFEclipse beginners don't realize Eclipse is the real power and heart while CFEclipse harnesses it and adds features.

Here is my list of underused Eclipse shortcuts for ColdFusion users.

6. Quick Switch Editor – Ctrl+E
You can quickly switch editors using the Ctrl+E keybinding which opens a list of all open editors. The list supports type-ahead to find the editor as well as allows you to close editors using a popup menu or the Delete key.
5. Delete commands
Previous word – Ctrl+backspace,
Next word – Ctrl+delete
Line – Ctrl+d
To end of line – Ctrl+Shift+delete

4. Go to last edit location – Ctrl+Q
Ctrl+Q takes you back to the place where you last made a change.

3. Now, where was I? – Alt+Left Arrow
Workbench editors keep a navigation history. If you open a second editor while you're editing, you can press Alt+Left Arrow to go back to the last editor. This makes working with several open editors a whole lot easier.

2. Faster workspace navigation – Ctrl+Shift+R
Ctrl+Shift+R brings up a dialog that allows you to quickly locate and open an editor on any file in the workspace. In the same vein, Navigate > Go To > Resource expands and selects the resource in the Project Explorer view itself, if it has focus.

1. Quick access – Ctrl+3
You can quickly find all manner of contributions with the Ctrl-3 binding including (but not limited to) open editors, available perspectives, views, preferences, wizards, and commands. Simply start typing the name of the item you wish to invoke and we will attempt to find something in the Workbench that matches the provided string.

Be sure to check out Help —> Key Assist (Ctrl+Shift+L) for other shortcuts and remember the list changes depending on the editor you are in. The definitions in italics above are from the Eclipse Documentation.

Top 6 underused Eclipse shortcuts for CFEclipse

3 Responses leave one →
  1. Jim Priest
    Jul 3, 2008 at 8:15 AM

    Added to the CFEclipse wiki :)

  1. Mike Henke
    Jul 3, 2008 at 10:17 AM

    Thanks Jim. There is another discussion going on @ http://tinyurl.com/6ggbrm about other shortcuts. Scott Stroz mentions Ctrl + Shift + N when focussed on a tag will show you the ending/beginning tag. I usually right-click and "jump to matching tag" so shortcut is great.

  1. popmYT
    May 15, 2009 at 2:03 AM

    Adobe needs to do something to their licensing structure. Right now its very hard to use on Amazon EC2 and other scalable datacenters. You can use Amazon EC2 to quickly scale from 1 to 10 (for example) servers when you get a sudden rush of traffic, but how do you handle the CF licenses? Right now you'd have to buy 10 licenses and let 9 of them be wasted most of the time.

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